'Like an episode of Only Fools and Horses' - the mystery of George The Greek and the missing tickets
Ireland went to the 1994 World Cup with high hopes. It ended in high farce
It was like an episode of Minder mixed with Mrs Brown’s Boys.
You had cameo appearances from Ireland’s most controversial pundit, U2’s drummer, a comedian and a disgraced Bishop.
But the story isn’t about them.
Instead it is about a mystery man called George the Greek and ticket money that went missing from the FAI during their 1994 World Cup campaign.
That’s where this story begins, with Eamon Dunphy striding across the lobby of the Hilton Hotel in Orlando, past U2’s Larry Mullan and Mrs Brown’s Boys writer Brendan O’Carroll.
Yet their celebrity status was dwarfed by the size of the next personality Dunphy saw.
Bishop Eamon Casey had left the Diocese of Galway two years earlier following the biggest sex scandal of the decade. A secret father of one, he ended up in Ecuador. Now he was here, searching for World Cup tickets, the sweat dripping down his beetroot face.
Dunphy shook his head in disbelief, muttered the words ‘for f*** sake’ and walked across to the elevator.
The bell boy asked which floor.
“Seven,” Dunphy replied.
A minute later there was a knock on the door.
“Ah Eamon,” the man who answered it, replied.
“What can I get you?”
The journalist-come-pundit was looking for four tickets for Ireland’s World Cup round of 16 match against the Netherlands.
“Here you can have these ones for free,” replied the man, flashing a toothy smile.
Gigantic
“I’m not taking them without paying,” Dunphy declared.
“I’ve the money here for you.”
With that, the man opened a gigantic suitcase and Dunphy stared into a thick pile of tickets. Across the carpeted floor of the man’s hotel room were dollars. Dunphy rolled his eyes and left.
An hour later, Brendan Menton knocked on the same door of that seventh floor room.
At that stage of his life Menton was a member of the FAI’s Council. Two years later, he was its Acting General Secretary, the footballing equivalent of a backbencher rising to become Taoiseach.
Menton recalls: “The room was a mess, thousands of tickets lying around, cash all over the place.
“I offered to pay for my two tickets by visa, even offered to get a visa machine brought down from New York, from a pal who was working there, to help them process the tickets.
“Politely I was told it was okay, that they were happy dealing in cash. The scene was pure and utter chaos.
“That week, during the FAI’s time staying there, the hotel safe got broken into and robbed. Seriously, it was like an episode of Only Fools and Horses.”
Even the characters involved in the story had names that would fit into the sitcom with a cast featuring Joe Delaney, the man with the tickets in that seventh floor room, the man who had sorted Dunphy, Menton, Mullan, O’Carroll and Bishop Casey.
In one sense it was comedy gold but two years later no one was laughing because by now Ireland’s most famous journalist was following the money trail.
Veronica Guerin was best known as a crime reporter, fearlessly going into Dublin’s underworld to expose the drug overlords who were ripping her city apart.
She was also a football fan and something about the FAI’s ticketing arrangements left her asking questions.
Menton and her became friendly: “Once she was on a story, she was never going to let it go. She was intense. After I became Acting General Secretary, in 1996, she’d frequently call, looking for clarity on information she had obtained. Her sources were exceptional. I found her approach straightforward and honest.
“We were due to meet the week before she died. She cancelled because that was the same day that Garda Gerry McCabe had been murdered and she was on her way down to Limerick to cover that story.”
Stories
“Next week,” she suggested.
If only.
Before Guerin and Menton got to meet, she was murdered, taken out in a gangland hit.
One of the last stories she wrote was about a man called George the Greek, the faceless tout at the heart of the FAI’s ticket scandal at the 1994 World Cup.
Nearly three decades later, not one picture of George the Greek has ever emerged. He remains a man of mystery, with many people, including Dunphy, wondering if he is a mythical figure.
“I never met George the Greek,” says Dunphy. “Nor did anyone I know. That day in Orlando, there were a number of touts outside the team hotel. All sorts of celebs were there, too. But George the Greek? No, I don’t even know if such a person exists.”
Come March 1996, though, George the Greek had an identity, Joe Delaney naming him as Theo, who the then-FAI Treasurer had negotiated with in order to secure tickets for Ireland’s matches in that 1994 World Cup.
Up until the Holland game, that had gone well.
Words
Then Ireland lost 2-0 to the Dutch and all of a sudden, the FAI’s Treasurer had — to use his own words — ‘arrived in a situation where we (the Irish team) were returning home and I had surplus tickets’ (for the World Cup quarter final between Brazil and Holland).
Delaney, in a statement released in 1996, explained: “Had we qualified for the quarter final in Dallas, these tickets would have been used but now they were non-returnable to FIFA and worthless if brought home.
“I then took what I considered at the time to be a calculated risk, but one which I now bitterly regret: I gave the tickets to Theo (aka George the Greek).
“I received assurances from him that all the monies due to the FAI would be paid on or before the FIFA settlement date in November.”
Now bear in mind the FAI had already messed up bartering tickets at Italia 90, when future FAI President Louis Kilcoyne had been arrested by Italian police outside the Brazil-Argentina game after trying to offload a batch of tickets.
Worse again, the FAI made a loss of around €130,000 at that tournament.
Now they were repeating those errors.
This is Dunphy’s take on those events: “The FAI guys weren’t touts. They were stupid, for sure. But they weren’t touting.
“It was just the classic Irish thing of trying to curry favour, get a pal, or a celeb, a ticket out in Orlando, in the hope that maybe one day they’d get you a ticket or do you a favour some place down the line.
“The real touts were outside the hotel. I genuinely think the FAI guys were trying to do good by people, trying to accommodate as many fans as possible. They were definitely not making money for themselves.”
Yet Menton remains more angry than bemused by the events of that 1994 World Cup. He says: “Football associations exist to develop the game. The idea that it was the FAI’s job to supply absolutely every Irish fan with a ticket is bizarre. For sure, grade A matches, like Ireland against Italy in Giants Stadium, had demand.
Tournament
“But there wasn’t the same demand for Ireland versus Norway in that tournament. Nor was there for Ireland against Romania in 1990. You couldn’t give tickets away that day. Nor could you give them away for Ireland against Italy in the World Cup quarter final that year.
“Remember the FAI made a loss in 1990. Yet in 1994, they were sourcing tickets again and bartering with touts. That made absolutely no financial sense.”
Guerin sensed this when she started digging into the issue in February 1996, revealing in The Sunday Independent that ‘a London-based ticket agent absconded with STG £210,000, which was revenue from tickets relating to the 1994 World Cup.”
Guerin also revealed how the shortfall was repaid by two cheques, one for £140,000 and another for £70,000 ‘in the name of a senior FAI official’.
That turned out to be Joe Delaney, who repaid the money owed to the FAI in November 1994, 14 months before the scandal became public.
Guerin later wrote that the 1994 World Cup shortfall came about because of ‘a ticket sting by two international ticket touts, who claimed that they had been left with unpaid bills by the FAI from a previous ticket transaction.’ As for Joe Delaney, he released a statement in March 1996, his attempt to clarify the issue.
He wrote: “On several occasions I went to London to try and secure the remaining funds without success. Despite many deadlines and further assurances no monies were forthcoming.
“At this stage I considered myself responsible for the debacle and decided to bridge the outstanding monies to the Association. I did so in two credit transfers … as in the early months of 1995 it became clear that Theo had vanished, and with him, his debts.”
Owed
Delaney, who passed away in 2023, repaid everything that was owed in 1994 but was voted out as FAI Treasurer in 1996, following a meeting of the FAI’s Council. Menton revealed Delaney later met him in Dublin’s Conrad Hotel seeking a repayment of £110,000.
Menton refused.
As for The George The Greek, the mystery of his actual existence remains as strong now as it was in 1996.
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